Author: Brian Payne
ISBN No: 9781 4522 199
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 448
Publisher: Sage
Publisher URL:
http://www.uk.sagepub.com
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Retail shrinkage, sexual harassment, insider trading, double billing and other frauds by staff – white-collar crime covers a lot of ground, as shown in a textbook on the subject.
As the book begins by saying, fairly few texts are available on white-collar crime. UK readers should note it’s written by an American professor, Brian Payne: the case studies, laws quoted, and 25-page reading list and web links are American. Another quibble is not with the book but the title – given that prime ministers and billionaires now aren’t necessarily seen in collars and ties, would a better title be ‘workplace crime’? All that said, the author has put together a wide-ranging book that’s weighty while easy on the eye; and early on he does go through the changing definitions of white-collar (or occupational) crime. The book goes into detail about the sorts of white-collar crime (from Ponzi schemes to insurance frauds to police corruption) rather than the psychology of such crime (breaches of trust, deceivers playing on the assumptions of co-workers, crimes by computer allowing anonymity).
Note also that the book’s for students, rather than investigators or security managers. Brian Payne writes: “Whenever I teach my criminal justice classes, I always ask my students if they would make crime go away if they could. Seldom do any students indicate that they would make crime disappear,” as they would be out of their course and a job. Payne also shows more wit than you usually find in a textbook.
